Though it did not light the box office afire when it first came out, John Carpenter‘s The Thing became an acclaimed horror classic in subsequent years. Like David Cronenberg’s The Fly, it’s frequently held up as an example of a horror remake far superior to the original. Re-interpreting the John W. Campbell novella Who Goes There?, Carpenter reimagined the alien Thing from a vegetable-based, blood-sucking creature to a fleshy shape-shifter with some truly disgusting interim forms. Carpenter also went back to the book for the name of his hero, MacReady — as always happened with Carpenter and Kurt Russell (see also Snake Plissken and Jack Burton), he became a genre icon. And now he’s a Mondo figure.
MacReady for Action
For years, The Thing proved an elusive toy license to obtain, with several companies trying and failing. Universal, it seems, only recently started to look at it as part of their valuable horror library. NECA snapped up the rights for 7-inch figures; Mondo, usually better known for stylized animated figures and artistic vinyls, steps into the 12-inch realistic movie figure field with this one. And price-wise, they’re a better deal than Sideshow or Hot Toys, considering the amount of stuff you get in the package.
Starting at noon central time, the deluxe edition of MacReady will take preorders for 10 days. This timed version of the figure, costing $265, includes an articulated spider-head monster and an unarticulated dog monster. After that, the regular edition for $235 will still be available and include everything but the monsters, including an alternate frozen head, gloved and ungloved hands, guns, flamethrower, and stand. He wears a fully tailored, clothed outfit with an internal body designed for those clothes to hang on.
Per Mondo, “It took quite a crew to realize Joe Allard’s design, including incredibly detailed sculpts by Pichet Pitsuwan and Matt Black, spot-on paints by Viola Wittrocka, Hector Arce and Ed Bradley, and cut and sew wizardry from Tim Hanson. And of course we needed Raúl Barrero’s photography skills to bring U.S. Outpost #31 to life.”
You can see some of those skills in action via the images below.
